problem with emerge gentoo-sources[SOLVED]

[cgwearne]

Hi,
I have a machine with an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB ram, Western Digital SATA hard drive and ASUS motherboard. I have had a problem with my second install of gentoo onto this machine. The first, completed using the 2007 installer in March 2008 went flawlessly. This time, following the guide to the letter, I reach emerge gentoo-sources when things start to fall apart. I have obtained the same error using both the 2008 installer (minimal install CD) and the previously OK 2007 minimal install CD. The error reads as follows:

[Errno 2] No such file or directory: /bin/bash -c "/usr/lib/portage/bin/ebuild.sh" postrm
!!!FAILED postrm: 1
[Errno 2] No such file or directory:
bash -c source '/usr/lib/portage/bin/isolated-functions.sh' ; eerror "The 'postrm' phase of the 'sys-libs/glibc-2.6.1' package has failed with" ; eerror "exit value 1. The problem occured while executing the ebuild located at " ; eerror "'/var/db/pkg/sys-libs/glibc-2.6.1/glibc-2.6.1.ebuild'. If necessary, "; eerror "manually remove the ebuild in order to skip the execution of removal" ; eerror "phases." ;


After this error has occured bash seems to become corrupted. I cannot use ls, rm, cp, less etc etc... I would dearly love to provide emerge --info but it says "bash /usr/bin/emerge: /usr/bin/python: bad interpreter: No such file or directory. This corruption of bash is again repeatable and happends with both the 07 and 08 minimal install CD.

I am uncertain as to how to procede to fix this problem. There was a somewhat similar post on 23/7/08 having trouble with emerge gentoo-sources but it did not seem exactly the same as this problem.

Many thanks for any suggestions.

Chris

[eccerr0r]

Are you sure the last ebuild to be processed is gentoo-sources? That's very odd. The symptoms you describe look more like something dealing with coreutils or glibc, or your machine's hardware is doing something really bad.

The glibc potential issue is that you're really trying to update it, and the dynamic linker loader ld-linux.so got trashed. Don't know why, perhaps building an improper version? Changing targets?

Do the files still exist? Do you have busybox installed, you could use that to do some cursory checks of what file is there. Try "busybox ls" to get an 'ls' if it deleted coreutils for some reason.
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[cgwearne]

thanks for the quick reply.

I am doing a clean install (shredded the disk prior to re-install) so I cant see that there could be any copy of glibc already present. 'busybox ls' yields 'bash: /bin/busybox: No such file or directory'

I agree that this is very strange;-) The computer was functioning fine before I had the brilliant idea of shredding the hard disk and re-installing everything so I dont believe the problem to be hardware related.

thanks for your help

Chris

[d2_racing]

If you need anything else, just post here
_________________
Sysadmin of Funtoo-Québec.org
Wiki
Signature
IRC on Freenode : #funtoo-quebec

[cgwearne]

I'm not any further along I have to admit, other than to establish that I don't have busybox. Any suggestions gratefully accepted.

[eccerr0r]

Now this is a bit late of a reply, not sure of current state of the machine:
Are you booted from the livecd/mininstall and chrooted, or off the disk itself?

If you dont want to reboot just yet you could try glob matching files to get an indication if a file still exists, like

echo /bin/l?

'echo' should be an internal to bash, and glob matching should return the files that match /bin/l? like /bin/ls and /bin/ln. If they're gone it will print the literal '/bin/l?'.

Likely either way you have to reboot with a livecd most likely. My guess at this point since things are really hosed is that glibc was omitted or trashed.
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[cgwearne]

Thanks eccerr0r,
I'm away from the machine for the weekend but will have a crack next week. I was in the chrooted environment when things went pear shaped. echo was still functional so I can try globbing as you suggest.

Chris

[eccerr0r]

You should be able to check things out before the chroot, and not worry about globbing. You should make sure that /chroot/lib/ld-linux.so.2 and /chroot/lib/ld-linux.so.1 still exist (usually are symlinks).

May need to use a ROOT=/chroot emerge glibc if that works with your setup. That failing, you may need to start over and carefully check what step breaks everything... a simple 'emerge' could pull in a lot of stuff. Could also check /var/log/emerge.log to see what got merged, too.
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[cgwearne]

For interests sake I thought I would report how I solved the problem.
I had not shredded /var which I had on a separate partition. For whatever reason this was interfering with the emerge of glibc. Shredding this partition then re-installing resolved the problem

Chris